16 Tiny Nooses
by Lumielt
Summary: Johanna develops a hobby for during the Games thanks to District 4. Contains some cussing and spoilers for deaths for all three books.


Summary  
Mags teaches Johanna how to knit a scarf. Contains spoilers about deaths for all three books.  
Also, I'm aware it wouldn't take years and years to knit a scarf. But I'm going on Johanna not always knitting it, only while the Games go on, and she's a slow knitter anyway.

It really started with Mags and Annie. Naturally anyone from District 4 was predisposed to be good with knots and ropes and nets and stringy tangly things like that, and from there, knitting was just a hop, skip, and jump away.  
Mags used to knit while the Games went on-or maybe she did at home as well, but the only time Johanna saw her do it was as tributes died on the screens in front of their eyes. Scarves and hats and mittens and sweaters that Finnick never wore in the Capitol but always did the few times Johanna visited his fishy-smelling district.  
Once, the elderly woman gave Johanna a potholder. It was totally useless, given that Johanna rarely cooked and even if she did, she could've had hundreds of silk and spun-gold Capitol potholders if she'd wanted. Totally useless.  
She kept it on her bedside table.  
Sometimes when the nightmares were really bad, she'd hold it like a child held a teddy bear. A reminder that even if she was alone, even though Snow had killed off all of her friends and family and anyone else that had been remotely kind to her, she still had the other Victors. Not that she'd ever say that out loud, of course. But the thoughts, like the useless potholder, were still there.  
When Annie Cresta recovered enough to be halfway sane, Mags showed her how to make cables and patterns and pictures with different colors in knitting, the brightly dyed yarns distracting the younger Victor from the bloodbath they were all supposed to watch. Annie's knitting was sometimes very tight and sometimes very loose, and never actually turned into anything, just uneven square-ish messes that Finnick would grin at as though they were the height of goddamn craftiness.  
Finnick being one of her only friends, Johanna often sat near him during the Games. They'd discuss sponsorships and tributes and odds and mock the latest Capitol styles and fads and other bullshit while Annie and Mags click-click-clicked with needles, neither wishing to view the children killing each other on-screen.  
Sometimes, when Finnick went off to talk to someone else or the Games were too gory or dull or just plain stupid (although, really, they always were), Johanna would watch the District 4 women. She'd never admit it, but she thought it was fascinating how just one piece of string could create entire sweaters or dishclothes or...whatever it was Annie created.  
Occasionally Mags offered to teach her, and Johanna always just curled her lip and walked away. Knitting was something the old ladies in 7 did as they gossiped about stupid nonsense things, making scarves out of damaged sweaters, unraveled into yarn, to keep the lumberjacks warm.  
But as the years went by, it became something of a secondhand hobby. It was surprisingly relaxing, watching the rhythmic movements of Mags' needles and the resulting growth of the project, wool looping and twisting in complicated patterns. And finally, when District 7's tributes had gotten their heads whacked open in the Cornucopia bloodbath and Finnick was off in god-knows-who's bed and Haymitch and Brutus were loudly singing songs as they got drunker and drunker in the corner of the room, Johanna snapped, "Fine. Teach me how to knit."  
Mags smiled, and after rummaging around in her bag for a bit produced a pair of metal needles and wool as soft as a lamb and green as Johanna's familiar pine trees.  
The old woman was patient, showing Johanna how to hold the needles and cast on and do a basic stitch for a scarf. 16 stitches, back and forth.  
Johanna *wasn't* patient, however, and it wasn't as easy as she'd initially thought. She resisted the urge to fling the stupid thing across the room multiple times, the only reason being that if there was anything more mockable than a Johanna Mason that could knit, it was a Johanna Mason that *couldn't* knit.  
But eventually she found her fingers mimicking Mags' in the proper ways, found one row becoming two becoming three becoming ten and before she knew it, and she had an inch of green scarf hanging off her needle.  
It was relaxing, and surprisingly satisfying, especially when you looked at it in the right light. 16 stitches were like 16 tiny nooses, and each stitch became a Capitol citzen dying, yarn wrapped around their throats. Annie would murmur under her breath as she knit, "Go around, slip under, go around, slip under." Johanna's internal murmur was simply "Dead, dead, dead."  
Cashmere once wandered over, smirk playing on her lips as she remarked "Didn't know you were such an old lady, Mason. Care to knit me a shawl?"  
She still had a vivid red scar from the puncture wound. The other Victors made no further remarks on Johanna's newfound hobby.  
When the Girl On Fire and her bread-boy went into the arena, the tree-colored scarf is almost finished. When her tributes die, the children she knew from her own district and trained and sponsored, the stitches become the Career tributes, tiny nooses choking off Cato and Glimmer and whatever the fuck their ridiculous names were.  
When the Quarter Quell is announced on the television, she screams and throws whatever's within reach at the wall-a book, a vase, the knitting-in a fit of righteous anger, and later ends up drinking with Blight and Tanning, the only other Victors in 7, until they all pass out on Blight's couch. Both are male. Like Katniss, there is no doubt that Johanna Mason is going back into the arena.  
When she's calmed down-slightly-and is nursing a killer headache the next morning, she brushes the broken glass from the scarf. She finishes it on the train ride to the Capitol. The final knot, the last noose, is President Snow.  
She doesn't wear it. It was never made for wearing, it was made purely for the sake of making it. For the soothing, repetitive stitches to distract her as children died, for the mild satisfaction of choking Gamemakers within her mind, and maybe, just maybe, because she likes Mags and Finnick and even Annie, because it felt nice to do something totally mundane with friends for once just because she felt like doing it.  
She gives it to Blight, in the end. She throws it at him and says, "Your token," and he gives her a sort of sad half-smile and wraps it around his neck.  
Then Blight dies, and Mags dies, and Finnick dies, and part of Johanna's own spirit dies with electrocution and the death of her friends.  
She keeps the needles with the bundle of pine Katniss gives her, but she doesn't knit again.


End file.
